The Monster Hunter Hunter

There was a chance I was going to be productive today, but in my heart of hearts I knew it was a small one. Today was the release day of the new Monster Hunter game, one of the few games that I actually pre-ordered and desperately needed to CONSUME.  

A bit of backstory: I've been a Capcom fan boy as long as I've been playing games. On my birthday, for as long as I can remember, I make sure I take time to play a Megaman game. This is my comfort food. I have countless Capcom franchise trinkets spread throughout my house. I actively buy all of the Street Fighter comics regardless of their quality (or canonical lore). I've played the majority of their titles and can generally find more enjoyment in even their worst games than most do. When I inevitably make it to Japan I will undoubtedly need to physically see their building.  

With all that said, Monster Hunter was a game I was always intrigued by but my lack of a PSP made it that I wasn't properly introduced to the series until the WII with Monster Hunter Tri, and for the life of me I could not get it to click. Monster Hunter has a history of being obtuse but it should have been something I could overcome. But I just couldn't. When the first 3ds demo came out I tried it again, and sure enough the dame thing happened. Finally I bit the bullet and bought Monster Hunter 4U, and that's where my journey finally started.

My first weapon was the hammer (hammer bros unite!) and that was strictly because it was simple. You had a few combos and it was so much more limited in scope compared to the other weapons: grab hammer, get in front, bonk monster on head. Once I started perceiving the fights as more like a fighting game, playing footsies and moving in and out, everything started to click. Because I was playing solo I eventually had to learn other weapons to try to maximize damage and also be able to cut tails for materials. This is where the game really opened up for me and I learned Glaive and Swords, until I eventually hit a wall in the G rank hunts where I just couldn't progress solo, but I loved every second.

While I loved Monster Hunter World and it finally getting mainstream success, I (maybe controversially) preferred playing through Rise on my Switch even more. Much like with Generations, Rise's inclusion on a portable platform got me back to being able to play the game more casually. One of my favorite ways to min max my life is playing a game while also riding my stationary exercise bike (big reason to have a Steam Deck these days). Rise also took Worlds accessibility even further and I would sit down daily to do an easier hunt while getting some amount of movement in. While I didn't love Rampages at first, learning bowguns made those feel even more like a tower defense game, and eventually taught me more about how much deeper the game could get.

That's one of my favorite things about this series. You can spend countless hours with a weapon, honing your craft, and then changing to a new fighting style makes your perspective on the gsme shift dramatically. The loop of the series is perfect for a quick hunt or a long session and their worlds feel more and more alive as they progress. As a person who gets obsessed with things they care deeply for, the amount of content they provide is perfect for my brain, once you get over the initial overwhelming amount of systems. But again, just perfect for my brain.

So how is Monster Hunter Wilds? I'm around 7 hours in so far and you need to understand that none of the meat and potatoes of these games really start until after the story when you get into the harder (and generally consistently drip fed via free dlc) fights. What I can say so far is that it feels great. I've started with the Hunting Horn as I loved it in Rise, despite it maybe being overpowered (but again, I was solo still so no complaints). The first horn is a comically large saxophone that is hilarious to look at and I bravely set out with Winston, my loyal palico, into battle. I love the new moves and the fights are as good as ever. The new chocobo-ish mount allows you to manually run or just let it auto run you to your objective. I've seen a fair amount of disparaging comments about this and the overall difficulty making the game feel too easy, but I imagine a lot of that will fix itself down the line as new content comes in. I do think there's a lot of stop and go with the story pausing the action, but again, I will gladly mainline the story to get to the loop I love soon. The game also feels like it is fully realizing it's open world with how frequently I'm in a fight and another monster runs in for a bit so everything really feels dynamic and lived in.

The swirl of media around the game does feel very positive though. I've read articles showing the Steam concurrent count was around a million today which is just mind blowing for a game that was so niche for so long. While I do plan on playing with real life humans soon I want to talk about my favorite new feature. When you go to start a quest you can now have npcs join you in your hunt! This means you can finally mess around with weapons or styles and learn them on quests while there are more characters on the field to draw monster aggression. It also means, theoretically, that my experiences of being locked out of harder content may finally be at an end and I'm wildly excited about this concept.

For what it's worth, I'm having a blast so far. My only gripe, which isn't Capcom's fault really, is that I'm tethered to a computer to play it. I'd love for this to natively run on the Steam Deck, if only to get more exercise. This may be the game that finally gets me to try out streaming to the Deck so that I can finally get back to getting proper workouts in. Until then I’ll work on getting through the story and hopefully I’ll see some of you out in the Wilds soon.